Six luminaries of the global IT Industry battled it out at a conference to come up with an answer for the question that's on everyone's minds today: Can India become a design powerhouse?

This indeed was the topic of panel discussion as part of the ongoing 14th International Conference on VLSI design. The discussion was moderated by Vishwani D Agarwal, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, USA, who also happened to be chairing the Conference Steering Committee.

Craig Peterson, GM, Intel Corporation said, “Design Powerhouse implies leadership. India should achieve technical leadership. Though India has talented people, they are not trained for leadership technology." Ringing out a message for India, he said, “The future is no longer the same as the past. The industry has a great role in making India an expertise centre. India should get there before 2004.”

“Basic infrastructure, competition, market, available skilled human resource and jump-start __ these are the basic success criteria for India to become a design powerhouse,” said Narendra Jain, Director, R&D, Cadence.
Today, the global electronic design market is growing at a rate of 20 per cent. The US design market stands at about $30-50 billion. There is a massive demand supply gap in the labour pool. India could also be a $20 billion business.

Stressing on the need to ‘jump-start’, he said, “The best-in-class countries are marching ahead of us. The way we are going now will not take us towards becoming a design powerhouse at least for the next five years. We need to gear up and ‘jump-start’. We need to facilitate more MNCs to enter India.”

“Today there may be hardly 10,000 VLSI design engineers in India. With this miniscule manpower, how can we think of India becoming a design powerhouse?” he questioned.

However, Mahesh Mehendale of Texas Instruments (TI) struck a note of optimism. “When asked to participate in this discussion, I was a trifle surprised at the topic as India is already a design powerhouse," he said beginning his address.  In the last 15 years of its existence, TI India has developed many world-class products across design spectrum (RF/power/memory/ analog/digital/mixed signal). He said TI India has alone presented more than 125 papers and  125 patents. This is just an indicator of what our company has achieved, not to forget the achievements of the Indian design industry as a whole.”

Raj Raghavan, Vice President (Marketing), Real Chip, pointed out the inhibiting factors and the key enablers that would make India a design power house.

According to him the inhibiting factors are:

• Lack of experienced talent
• Pricing differential of semiconductor tools and equipment
• Current consumer base
• Market awareness
• Pro-active government intervention

• Attracting overseas talent, training curriculum, increasing general market awareness
• Tax subsidies, guaranteed return-of-investment, strategic attraction of marquee companies
• Industry participation in awareness activities\continuously making vendors aware of pricing incongruities, collective bargaining

Rajendra Khare, Broadcom said, “India is getting recognised for its ‘design services’ at the international level. However, there is a lot to do when it comes to IP and product development. Doing something in these two areas will get us closer to being a powerhouse.”

He said, "Technology is like honey. It grows in a beehive and we need to create that beehive (right infrastructure and environment)."